FRCC grinds away to help fill machinist shortage

A dearth of qualified machinists has spurred Front Range Community College to start a noncredit training course to meet local manufacturing needs.

Dec. 8, 2012

Derek Fritz, a machinist at Whip Mix in Fort Collins, sets up a machine to create parts Friday. Whip Mix is one of several Northern Colorado companies serving on a steering committee that is working with Front Range Community College to set up a nondegree training program to help fill the need for more machinists in the area. / V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan

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Brian Sibley, a machinist at Whip Mix in Fort Collins, sets up a machine to create parts Friday. Whip Mix is one of several Northern Colorado companies serving on a steering committee that is working with Front Range Community College to set up a nondegree training program to help fill the need for more machinists in the area. / V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan

Information meeting

Front Range Community College will host an information session about the noncredit precision machining training program from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Thursday in the community room of the classroom building of its Boulder County Campus, 2121 Miller Drive, Longmont.

Class schedule

The class will meet from 6 to 9 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every other Saturday from Feb. 4 to April 20 in Longmont. Information: Veronica Chavez, veronica.chavez@

Don Schell, a machinist at Woodward in Fort Collins, sets up a machine to make a valve Friday. Several Northern Colorado companies are working with Front Range Community College to set up a nondegree training program to help fill the need for more machinists in the area. / V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan

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Manufacturing, it seems, suffers from an image problem.

Often seen as a dangerous, dirty and dying profession that bled jobs by the factory-load during the recession, the need for machinists is hitting a critical juncture.

Beset by a wave of baby boomers nearing retirement, a younger generation often dissuaded from the industry because of a perceived impermanence, and a resurgence of outsourced jobs returning to the U.S., manufacturers are feeling the pinch. The number of machinists entering the workforce is not keeping pace with those leaving after long careers.

“We’ve done a poor job in the industry of marketing machinists,” said Keith Korasick, director of manufacturing at Woodward in Fort Collins. “When you think of manufacturing, you think dull, dingy, dirty, cold, low-tech. The next thing that comes to mind is outsourcing, all the jobs are moving to China. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Today, every machine on Woodward’s floor is run by a computer that requires someone with brains and critical thinking skills to operate.

“This is not your grandfather’s machine shop,” said Rick Calhoun, manufacturing engineer of Whip Mix in Fort Collins, a Water Pik offshoot that manufactures professional products for dentists and dental schools. “The ones with greasy, noisy, dangerous stuff have gone out of business. You can’t survive with that kind of technology.”

Woodward hired 35 new machinists last year, fewer than the company needed to meet its production schedule. That lack of bodies forced the company’s machinists to work mandatory overtime, six days a week, Korasick said.

“We can’t get people in fast enough to cover the load so we end up working a lot of hours,” he said. “It doesn’t help morale when it’s July and people want to go away but they have to work Saturdays because we can’t get enough staff to cover the equipment.”

Calhoun said Whip Mix would likely expand faster than it has if it could find the workers. “We have not been able to hire all the skilled people we need and a lot of times end up just taking the best available person,” he said. That often ends up being someone with lesser or no machinist skills who takes longer and costs more to train.

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Woodward and Whip Mix are among several Northern Colorado businesses working with Front Range Community College to identify and ease the regional machinist shortage.

In February, FRCC will start a short-term, noncredit training program at its Longmont campus designed to fill the machinist gap quickly.

In meetings with more than 30 Northern Colorado manufacturers, more than 90 percent said they wanted to hire an average of five machinists in the next year, said George Newman, FRCC program development coordinator for machining. In many of those cases, the jobs will go wanting for qualified workers.

Assessing the need

The demand for machinists is expected to grow about 7 percent nationally, adding 29,900 jobs through 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

With the average age of a machinist between 55 and 60, the looming drain of experienced machinists could turn into a full-blown crisis if companies don’t step up recruitment efforts in high schools and colleges and promote manufacturing as a noble profession, according to global management consulting firm The Boston Consulting Group.

A BCG report estimates up to 100,000 manufacturing jobs would go unfilled through 2020 if the shortage is not addressed.

Although machinists in Colorado start at a fairly modest pay rate — entry-level salary is $13.42 per hour, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment — with a decade of experience annual wages can be in the high five figures, Newman said. The median salary for machinists last year was $19.62 per hour, or $40,800 per year.

“We have at most a 10-year window to find replacements,” Newman said. “If we don’t make a concerted effort to recruit new machinists, we will see the demise of the industry.”

At Whip Mix, 75 percent of its workers are older, Calhoun said. When several machinists retired recently, they took their institutional knowledge with them. Whip Mix is now trying to capture and document that knowledge before it walks out the door.

The Front Range program will help bring in a new generation of skilled workers, but it will still be a few years before they are hired at Whip Mix, Calhoun said. Like many other shops, there are only so many entry-level people the company has the time or staff to train. But he’s excited about the prospects being created at Front Range.

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“The thing people are not understanding about manufacturing is that it’s cool. It really is,” Calhoun said. “You have to be smart, creative and inventive. It’s a technology-driven industry now.”

About the program

The Front Range program’s four courses focus on soft skills such as communication and teamwork, along with the hard computer and machining skills. The first class, intro to machining, is 81 hours of class time devoted to the workplace and machine skills, safety topics and work ethic the job demands.

“When you are a machinist you are responsible for equipment that varies from $100,000 to $1 million,” Korasick said. “We need to have the right people to run them because it’s a significant investment for Woodward. There’s not one machinist in our shop that doesn’t have responsibility to a team, but it’s amazing how many people struggle with the team concept.”

Other classes are machining operator training, advanced machining and intermediate quality control for the machine shop.

The more advanced classes are suited for someone who has completed the intro course or someone already in the industry who needs higher-level skills, Newman said.

The full four-class program will take about four months and cost about $2,000. Because it’s a nondegree program, students aren’t eligible for financial aid, a potential deterrent for some would-be students. Front Range is working to find scholarships in the form of internships and working with Northern Colorado workforce centers to identify possible training dollars, Newman said.

Larimer County Workforce Center has 500 job seekers who list machinist as one of their job skills and only four job listings for machinist, said Jacob Castillo, economic development manager and enterprise zone administrator. But only about three dozen of those job seekers have industry standard computer numerical controlled, or CNC, machine skills, he said, and many small manufacturers use their own networks to find workers rather than advertising through the workforce center. “We are seeing a dearth of CNC skills,” Castillo said.

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Other companies, like Woodward, are paying the full cost for two of its employees to be trained as machinists. It’s one way to grow their own machinists.

Adam Hayes, 23, and Kyle Bertholf, 27, joined Woodward a year ago as production workers. The company approached them about going through the training and becoming machinists. It’s an investment in their future with the company, Korasick said. Working full time and going to school in Longmont three days a week for four months won’t be easy, he acknowledged.

“It’s a great opportunity when a company is willing to invest in your future as well as theirs,” said Hayes, who bounced around from job to job after dropping out of college to help take care of his family. “It really is worth it when you take a step back and look at it. It involves changing some things in my schedule and letting go of some free time, but it will pay off in the end.”

Bertholf said going back to school will expand his horizons at Woodward and help secure his future and that of his wife and first child, due to arrive in May.

Having a stable career with Woodward was part of their decision to start a family, he said. “Whatever will help me and my family, I will do what’s best.”